The robots.txt file is a straightforward text file that is placed on your web server and instructs web crawlers whether or not they should access a particular file. The robots.txt file regulates how web crawlers from search engines access and use your web pages.
The search engine is unable to index a website as a result of improperly set ROBORTS.TXT files. Additionally, the robot.txt file is utilized to prevent a website from being indexed by a search engine. A website may not be listed on a search engine as a result.
Your website may occasionally see a lot of bot traffic, which uses up a lot of bandwidth and causes it to load slowly. To avoid such situations, it is crucial to ban such bots.
There is a potential that your website will experience high levels of traffic, which may result in issues such as a large server load and unstable servers. Mod Security plugin installation will stop these kinds of problems.
Let us learn how to block the robot.txt file in the simple ways mentioned below:
Changing the Robots.txt file to stop it from Blocking all Web Crawlers
The ROBOTS.TXT file is normally located in the website’s document root. Your preferred text editor can be used to alter the robots.txt file. We describe the ROBOTS.TXT file in this post, along with where to find and how to change it. The typical ROBOTS.TXT file sample is as follows:User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The User-agent attribute’s * (asterisk) symbol denotes that all search engines are permitted to index the website. You can prevent any search bot or spider from indexing any page or folder by utilizing the Disallow option. A search engine crawler cannot access any pages because of the “/” following DISALLOW.
You can add your website to Google or another search engine and enable the search engine to scan your website by removing the “*” from the User-agent and the “/” from the Disallow option. The steps for modifying the ROBOTS.TXT file are as follows:
1) Sign in to your cPanel dashboard.
2) Open the “File Manager” and navigate to the root directory of your website.
3) The ROBOTS.TXT file must be located in the same directory as your website’s index file. The following code should be added to the ROBOTS.TXT file before saving it.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
By including the code below, you can also block a specific problematic User-Agent in the.htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Baiduspider [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F,L]
This is how you could accomplish it if you wanted to block many User-Agent strings at once:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(Baiduspider|HTTrack|Yandex).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F,L]
Furthermore, you can worldwide prohibit particular bots. Please log in to your WHM to complete this.
After that, you must go to Apache Configuration >>. Include Editor >> Select “Pre Main Include” >> Choose the appropriate Apache version (or all versions) >> Enter the following code and click Update to have Apache restart.
<Directory “/home”>
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “MJ12bot” bad_bots
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “AhrefsBot” bad_bots
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “SemrushBot” bad_bots
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “Baiduspider” bad_bots
<RequireAll>
Require all granted
Require not env bad_bots
</RequireAll>
</Directory>
This will undoubtedly lessen the burden on the server and assist you in enhancing the functionality and speed of your website.
You Might Also Like,
- How To Unleash The Power Of Pre-Outreach Strategy – [Steps]
- 6 Dos And Don’ts For Building A Successful Travel Website
Conclusion:
I hope you found this article helpful and relevant and now you know how to block bots using Robot.txt file.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Q. Can bots ignore robots.txt?
It is likely that bad bots will ignore your robots. txt file, you might want to block their user agent with an htaccess file.
Q. What can I do with a robots.txt file?
The robots.txt file can be used for web pages (HTML, PDF, or other non-media formats that Google reads), to manage crawling traffic, or to prevent Google’s crawler from crawling unimportant or similar pages.
Q. Do hackers use robots.txt?
As robots.txt tells search engines which directories can and cannot be crawled on a server, it can be of great value to hackers when it comes to attacks.
Q. How do I bypass robots.txt?
It’s easy to tell your crawler not to respect robots.txt by writing it so it doesn’t. There is a possibility that you are using a library that respects robots.txt automatically, if so, you will need to disable that (which will usually be an option you pass to the library when you call it).